Nine coalition troops killed: Pressure is building for withdrawal from Iraq

Nine troops from the U.S.-led multinational forces were killed Saturday in a mortar attack in the troubled city of Fallujah west of the capital.

Coalition officials said in a statement that six soldiers also were injured in the attack in Fallujah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad, but did not identify the nationalities of the casualties.

A growing tide of developments on the ground in Iraq and in the United States itself may result in irresistible pressure on the Bush administration to end U.S. involvement there, sooner rather than later.

This week has seen a drumfire of U.S. and Iraqi casualties from insurgent attacks that brought the number of Americans killed to 1,715 and counting. Claims by the Bush administration and its supporters that the insurgency is running out of gas are not borne out by the evidence.

On the U.S. military side, this week saw the appearance in Iraq of a phenomenon heretofore associated with a previous unpopular war, Vietnam: an Army staff sergeant is accused of having murdered two of his officers. In Vietnam it was called fragging.

On the home front, Army recruiting in May fell far below goals. The Army originally sought 8,050 recruits for the month. Seeing that it was going to fall short of that target, it lowered the bar to 6,700. It finally achieved about 5,000, even though incentives and the number of recruiters had been increased and standards lowered. The bottom line is that neither potential recruits nor their parents and families want to see them go into the Iraq maelstrom to be maimed or to die, in spite of President Bush’s claims that the Iraq war is part of the struggle against terrorism.

Mr. Bush’s credibility suffered another blow this week as the so-called Downing Street memo was aired in an informal congressional hearing. The memo — actually the minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and aides in July 2002, eight months before the United States invaded Iraq — said that the Bush administration had decided to go to war and was arranging the intelligence available to support such action.

There is always ambiguity in what one government’s observers say about another’s machinations. If the Downing Street memo was on the mark, however, it is saying that all the administration consultations with the United Nations, America’s allies and the Congress itself between July 2002 and March 2003 were pure theater: The Bush administration had already decided to go to war for its own reasons and was simply playing political games in the meantime with the other interested parties, including the American people.

In Iraq itself, the timetable which was supposed to produce a finished constitution by August is way off schedule. The Iraqis are still wrangling about the membership of the drafting committee, although there may now be agreement on letting some Sunnis participate, an essential element. Iraqi troops are being trained, but no one — with the possible exception of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — believes that force is anywhere close to becoming able to assure security in Iraq. The Iraqi forces are dying, but they aren’t winning.

Another difficulty is the growing aggressiveness of Iraq’s Kurds in staking out their own homeland in Iraq, which they hope will hold together despite the country’s growing sectarian violence. Neighboring Turkey, with a 25-percent Kurdish minority, is finding growing Kurd autonomy in Iraq alarming.

One result of this confluence of events in Iraq and in the United States is growing pressure from Congress on Mr. Bush to declare a timetable for withdrawal. He is still acting as though he doesn’t get it, but he will not be able to maintain that posture for long, faced with violent events and plummeting popularity figures. Wars should not be determined on the basis of polls, but only 3 out of 8 respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll this week approved his handling of Iraq.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05169/523564.stm